Search here...
Home Blog Page 5

Jonathan Cook: Dr Abu Safiya symbolised humanity in Gaza. Israel and the West are destroying it

By
Cafe Pacific Publisher
-
0

Israel isn’t eradicating “the terrorists”. It’s turning Gaza into a wasteland, a hellscape, where doctors no longer exist, aid workers are a memory, and compassion a liability, writes Jonathan Cook.

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook in Middle East Eye

If there was an image from 2024 that captured the year’s news, it was this one: Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, in a white lab coat, picking his way through the wreckage of the Kamal Adwan hospital he ran — the last surviving major medical facility in northern Gaza — towards two Israeli tanks, their gun barrels aimed at him.

The past year has been dominated by the death and destruction Israel has wrought throughout the tiny enclave.

It has been marked by the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians — the deaths we know about — and the maiming of at least 100,000 more; the starvation of the entire population; the levelling of the urban and agricultural landscape; and the systematic erasure of Gaza’s hospitals and health sector, including the killing, mass arrest and torture of Palestinian medics.


War on Gaza: Healthcare system crisis.   Video: Al Jazeera

2024 was dominated, too, by a growing consensus from international legal and human rights authorities that all this amounts to genocide.

Here was an image, from the very final days of the year, that said it all. It showed a lone doctor — one who had risked his life to keep his hospital operational as it was besieged by Israeli forces, battered by Israeli shells and drones, and had its staff picked off by Israeli snipers — bravely heading towards his, and his people’s, exterminators.

He had paid a personal price, just as much as his patients and staff. In October, his 15-year-old son, Ibrahim, was executed during an Israeli raid on the hospital. A month later, he himself was wounded by shrapnel from an Israeli strike on the building.

By December 27, the hospital could no longer withstand Israel’s savage onslaught. When a loudspeaker demanded that Dr Abu Safiya come towards the tanks, he set off grimly across the rubble.

It was the moment that the Kamal Adwan hospital’s fight to protect life was brought to a sudden end; when the genocidal Israeli war machine notched an inevitable victory against the last outpost of humanity in northern Gaza.

Held in torture camp
The image was also the last known one of Abu Safiya, taken minutes before his so-called “arrest” — his abduction — by Israeli soldiers, and his disappearance into Israel’s system of torture camps.

After days of claiming it had no knowledge of his whereabouts, the Israeli military finally confirmed it was holding him incommunicado. The admission appears to have come only because of a petition to the Israeli courts from a local medical rights group.

According to a growing number of reports, Dr Abu Safiya is now in the most notorious of Israel’s torture facilities, Sde Teiman, where soldiers were caught on video last year raping a Palestinian inmate with a baton until his insides ruptured.

The hope is that Dr Abu Safiya will not suffer the fate of his colleague, Dr Adnan al-Bursh, the former head of orthopaedics at Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital. After four months of abuse at Ofer prison, Dr Bursh was dumped by guards in its yard, naked from the waist down, bleeding and unable to stand. He died a short time later.

Reports by human rights agencies and the United Nations — as well as testimonies from whistleblowing camp guards — tell of the systematic beating, starvation, sexual abuse and rape of Palestinian prisoners.

Israel has accused Dr Abu Safiya, Gaza’s best-known paediatrician, of being a Hamas “terrorist”. It has abducted a further 240 people from Kamal Adwan Hospital who it claims are “terror suspects” — presumably chiefly among them patients and medical staff – and they are being held in similarly horrifying conditions.

Psychotic logic
According to Israel’s psychotic logic, anyone who works for Gaza’s Hamas government — meaning anyone like Dr Abu Safiya employed in one of the enclave’s major institutions, such as a hospital — counts as a terrorist.

By extension, any hospital — because it falls under the Hamas government’s authority — can be treated as a “Hamas terrorist stronghold”, as Israel has termed Kamal Adwan. Ergo, all medical facilities should be destroyed, all doctors “arrested” and tortured, and all patients forcibly “evacuated”.

A patient at Kamal Adwan hospital.
An “evacuation” of this kind means only one thing: patients being left to die of their wounds, illnesses or malnourishment – and increasingly from the cold, too. Image: www.jonathan-cook.net

In Kamal Adwan’s case, the wounded, the seriously ill and those about to give birth were allowed 15 minutes to unhook their drips, get out of their sickbeds and make their way into the wrecked courtyard.

Then the Israeli army set the hospital on fire.

An “evacuation” of this kind means only one thing: patients being left to die of their wounds, illnesses or malnourishment — and increasingly from the cold, too.

A growing number of babies have been dying of hypothermia as their families huddle through winter nights under canvas, without blankets or proper clothing, in the tent encampments that have become home to most of Gaza’s population.

The photograph of Dr Abu Safiya’s surrender made it only too clear who is David and who Goliath; who is the humanitarian and who the terrorist.

Most of all, it demonstrated how the West’s political and media classes have spent the past 15 months promoting a grand lie about Gaza. They have not been seeking to end the bloodshed, but to cover it up — to excuse it.

This might explain why the most defining image of 2024 was barely visible in establishment media outlets, let alone on their front pages, as Dr Abu Safiya was abducted by Israel and his hospital destroyed.

Most foreign editors and picture editors — dependent on salaries from their billionaire owners — appeared to prefer to pass on the news photograph of the year. Social media, however, did not. Ordinary users spread it far and wide. They understood what it showed and what it meant.

‘Consciousness warfare’
Late last month, Israel announced that this coming year, it would be spending an extra $150 million on what it has termed “consciousness warfare”.

That is, Israel is upping its budget 20-fold to improve its media disinformation campaigns — to whitewash its image as the slaughter in Gaza continues.

Israel has killed many of Gaza’s journalists and barred foreign correspondents from its undeclared “kill zones”. But in an era of live-streaming on phones, concealing a genocide is proving far harder than Israel imagined.

It is not enough, it seems, to have the Western establishment peddling your disinformation.

Israel is particularly concerned about young people — such as students on campuses — who do not consume news filtered through the BBC or CNN, and thus have a much clearer grasp of what is happening. Their senses and sensibilities have not been dulled by years of Western corporate propaganda.

They are much less likely, for example, to fall for the Israeli fake news — recycled and given credence by Western media — that has justified over the past 15 months the complete destruction of Gaza’s hospitals, or the kind of disinformation that entertains the idea that an esteemed physician like Dr Abu Safiya is secretly a terrorist.

The genesis of Israel’s campaign to erase Gaza’s health sector started within days of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack. Less than two weeks later, Israel fired a powerful missile at the courtyard of Gaza City’s al-Ahli hospital; dozens of Palestinian families who had fled there, seeking protection from Israel’s military rampage, were caught in the explosion.

But the media laundered this opening shot in the war on Gaza’s hospitals by credulously echoing Israel’s preposterous assertion that a misfired Palestinian rocket, rather than an Israeli missile, had done the damage.

The attack on al-Ahli set out Israel’s blueprint for genocide, one it has followed closely over the past 15 months. It made clear to Palestinians that nowhere would be safe from Israel’s onslaught, not even established sites of sanctuary such as hospitals, mosques and churches.

There would be no place to escape its wrath.

And it made clear to Western leaders and media that Israel was ready to breach every known precept of international humanitarian law. There was no atrocity, no war crime it would not commit, including destroying Gaza’s medical system.

Israel’s patrons were expected to give their full backing to the war, however far Israel went. And that is exactly what they did.

Red herrings
Looking back, the brief furore over whether Israel was responsible for the attack on al-Ahli seems nightmarishly quaint now. With the lack of any pushback, Israel intensified its “consciousness warfare”, creating a bubble of fake news to connect Gaza’s hospitals to Hamas terrorism.

Within weeks, Israel was claiming to have discovered a Hamas terrorist base under Gaza’s al-Rantisi children’s hospital, with weapons stashes and a guard duty rota in Arabic for the Israeli hostages — except the rota was quickly shown to be nothing more than an innocuous calendar.

Israel’s biggest target was al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s most important medical facility. Israel released a CGI-generated video showing it sitting atop an underground “Hamas command and control centre”. The claims were once again credulously aired by Western media, though the Hamas bunker was never found.

These lies served their purpose, nonetheless. Even as Israel wrecked Gaza’s hospitals and denied entry to medical aid, leaving Gaza without any way to treat the men, women and children maimed by Israel’s relentless bombing, the media turned its focus away from these all-too-obvious crimes against humanity.

Instead, as Israel hoped, journalists expended their energies chasing after red herrings, trying to verify each individual lie.

The media’s working premise appeared to be that, should the faintest hint of complicity between Hamas and a single hospital, or doctor, in Gaza be confirmed, Israel’s campaign to erase all medical facilities in the enclave and deny healthcare to 2.3 million people caught in its killing fields would be justified.

Mass graves
Notably, none of the stream of senior Western doctors who volunteered in Gaza reported upon their return home having seen any sign of the armed “Hamas terrorists” who were supposedly crawling all over the hospitals in which they had worked.

These Western doctors were rarely interviewed by the media as a counterpoint to Israel’s endless disinformation, which created the rationalisation for Israel to lay waste to Gaza’s hospitals and medical centres with utter abandon.

Soldiers invaded the hospitals one after another, destroying the wards, operating rooms and intensive care units.

Each forcible “evacuation” created its own trail of misery. Premature babies were left to starve or freeze to death inside their incubators. The critically ill were forced from their beds. Ambulances that tried to collect them were blown up. And each time, Gaza’s medical staff were rounded up, stripped of their clothing and “disappeared”.

Western journalists showed little interest, too, in the discovery of unidentified corpses in makeshift mass graves on hospital grounds after Israeli soldiers had finished their assaults — bodies that had been decapitated or mutilated, or showed indications of having been buried alive.

For these reasons and more, the UN Human Rights Office concluded last week that Gaza’s hospitals, “the one sanctuary where Palestinians should have felt safe, in fact, became a death trap”.

Similarly, a World Health Organisation official, Rik Pepperkorn, observed: “The health sector is being systematically dismantled.”

The WHO is seeking urgent, life-saving treatment abroad for more than 12,000 people, he added. “At the current rate, it would take five to 10 years to evacuate all these critically ill patients.”

In another statement last week, two UN experts warned that Dr Abu Safiya’s arbitrary detention was “part of a pattern by Israel to continuously bombard, destroy and fully annihilate the realisation of the right to health in Gaza”.

They noted that, in addition to the mass round-ups, at least 1057 Palestinian health and medical professionals had been killed so far.

Trajectory to genocide
The truth is that Israel’s new, better-funded disinformation campaign will prove no more effective than its existing ones.

Avi Cohen-Scali, the head of Israel’s ministry for combating antisemitism, said a decade of such programmes against what Israel calls its “delegitimisation” — that is, the exposure of its apartheid and now genocidal character — had yielded “nearly zero results”.

He told Israeli media: “This activity has failed by every conceivable parameter.”

The reality of a genocide will be impossible to airbrush away. Over the coming months, more Israeli atrocities — new and historic — will come to light. More legal and human rights organisations and scholars will conclude that Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) will issue more arrest warrants for war crimes, following those against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.

At the weekend, an Israeli soldier on holiday in Brazil was forced to flee the country after he was warned he was under investigation.

But there is more. Leading rights organisations and scholars will have to reformulate their historical understanding of both Israel and its founding ideology of Zionism. They will need to acknowledge that this genocide did not come out of nowhere.

The trajectory began when Zionism was established as a settler-colonial movement more than a century ago. It continued when Israel was created through a mass ethnic cleansing operation against the native Palestinian population in 1948.

And it gathered speed in 1967 as Israel formalised its apartheid system, engineering separate rights for Jews and Palestinians, and forcing Palestinians into ever-shrinking ghettoes.

Unchecked, Israel’s ultimate destination was always towards genocide. It is an ideological compulsion embedded in Israel’s notions of ethnic supremacy and chosen-ness.

Mad Max vision
Even after the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant in November, Israeli leaders continued their explicit incitement to genocide.

Last week, eight legislators from the Israeli Parliament’s foreign affairs and defence committee wrote to the new Defence Minister, Israel Katz, demanding that he order the destruction of the last sources of water, food and energy in northern Gaza.

It was precisely Israel’s current starvation of Gaza’s population that led to Netanyahu and Gallant being charged with crimes against humanity.

Meanwhile, the destruction of Kamal Adwan Hospital clears the ground for a new policy in northern Gaza: what Israel is chillingly calling “Chernobylisation”.

Named after the Soviet nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, the policy views the Palestinian presence in Gaza as a comparable threat to the 1986 radioactive leak. The military’s goal is to erase all Palestinian infrastructure above and below ground, echoing Soviet emergency efforts to contain Chernobyl’s radiation.

Where does this lead?

Louise Wateridge, the senior emergency officer for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, noted at the weekend that Israel was accelerating Gaza’s complete social collapse by driving Unrwa out of the enclave.

Israeli legislation coming into effect at the end of this month will bar the refugee agency from operating in Gaza to provide families with what little food and shelter is available, given Israel’s aid blockade.

It will also, in the absence of hospitals, deprive Gaza of its last meaningful health services. Wateridge noted: “Unrwa does something like 17,000 health consultations a day in the Gaza Strip. It’s impossible for another agency to replace that.”

The danger she underscores is that Gaza will become completely lawless. Families will face not only Israel’s bombs, assassination drones and starvation programme, but also the dystopian rule of criminal gangs.

This is exactly what Israel intends for Gaza. As a report in Haaretz last week revealed, following the “Chernobylisation” of northern Gaza, Israel is mulling plans to let two big Palestinian crime families rule the south.

These are likely to be the same gangs that are looting the few aid trucks that Israel allows into Gaza, assisting Israel in depriving the population of food and water.

Israel’s vision for Gaza’s future is a post-apocalyptic cross between the Mad Max film franchise and Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road.

Cover story
The trajectory to genocide might have been hardwired into Zionism’s coding, but it has been the task of Western leaders, media outlets, academia, think tanks and even human rights organisations to pretend otherwise.

They have spent decades holding the line on what should long ago have been a thoroughly discredited Western narrative: that Israel was only ever a sanctuary for Jews from antisemitism, that it is “the only democracy in the Middle East”, that its occupation is largely benign and its illegal settlements a necessary security measure, and that the Israeli army is “the most moral in the world”.

Those fictions are unravelling faster than Israel’s disinformation can ever hope to stitch them back together.

So why do more of it? Because Israel’s “consciousness warfare” is not primarily directed at you and me. It is directed at Western leaders.

This is not to persuade them of anything; British Prime Minister Keir Starmer knows full well there is a genocide going on in Gaza, as does Donald Trump, the incoming US President.

They simply do not care — not least because you cannot reach the summit of a Western political system unless you are prepared to think sociopathically about the world. There is a Western military industrial complex to placate, and Western corporations to service that expect to maintain their dominion over global resource extraction.

This is why in the dying days of his presidency, with no votes to win, Joe Biden has dropped the pretence of “tirelessly working for a ceasefire” or demanding that Israel send in at least 350 aid trucks a day.

Instead, he has announced as a parting gift to Israel a further $8 billion in arms, including munitions for fighter jets and attack helicopters.

No, the goal of Israel’s disinformation campaign is to provide a cover story. It is to muddy the waters just enough to obscure Western leaders’ support for genocide; to give them an excuse for continuing to send weapons, and to help them evade a war crimes trial at The Hague.

The goal is “plausible deniability”: to be able to claim that what was obvious was not too obvious, that what was known to ordinary onlookers was unclear to those directly participating.

Western leaders know that Israel has dragged off Dr Abu Safiya — one of Gaza’s great healers — to one of its torture camps, where he is almost certainly being starved, intermittently beaten, humiliated and terrorised, like the other inmates.

Israel’s work now is to weaken and destroy his physical and mental resilience, just as it has dismantled Gaza’s hospitals.

Israel’s goal is not to eradicate “the terrorists”. It is to turn Gaza into a wasteland, a hellscape, in which no one good, no one who cares, no one trying to cling on to their humanity can survive.

A place where doctors do not exist, aid workers are a memory, and compassion is a liability; a place where tanks and criminal gangs rule.

The job of the Western political and media class is to make all this appear as routine and normal as possible. Their job is to deaden us inside, to hollow out our ability to care or resist, to leave us numb. We must prove them wrong — for Dr Abu Safiya’s sake, and for our own.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years and returned to the UK in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, including Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). In 2011, Cook was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism for his work on Palestine and Israel. This article was first published in Middle East Eye and is republished with the author’s permission.

Majed al-Zeer: Amid genocide, the tide is turning for Palestine but the fight is far from over

By
Cafe Pacific Publisher
-
0

ANALYSIS: By Majed al-Zeer

The suffering of the Palestinian people, which began with the Nakba and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, reached brand new depths in the past 15 months.

More than 46,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed and more than 110,000 injured in Israel’s continuing genocide in Gaza. More than 10,000 others are missing, arbitrarily detained, or known to be buried under the rubble of their destroyed homes.

Israel’s relentless attacks have not spared homes, schools, and even hospitals in the besieged Strip. Hundreds of thousands of survivors, pushed out of their homes and into makeshift tents in so-called “safe zones”, are facing indiscriminate air strikes, daily massacres, disease outbreaks, hunger and harsh winter conditions with no end in sight to their misery.

Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are also under attack from Israeli forces and settlers and lack most basic rights and freedoms.

Palestinians document the atrocities committed against their people by Israel one by one and share them with the world in real-time for everyone to see.

South Africa has launched a genocide case against Israel at the World Court (ICJ), backed by a large variety of countries including Mexico, Brazil and Turkiye.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has also taken action against Israel, issuing arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Global public supports Palestine
The global public is also clear in its support for Palestinians, with tens of thousands of pro-Palestinian protests, vigils and sit-ins held across the world, attracting support from millions of people from all walks of life, since the beginning of the genocide on 7 October 2023.

Despite all this, however, Israel appears able to continue its crimes openly and with impunity. This is because its Western supporters and benefactors, especially the United States, turn a blind eye to all of Israel’s excesses, and refuse to acknowledge — let alone punish — its blatant violations of international law.

Washington particularly, as the main supplier of arms, bombs and other military equipment to Israel, has not done anything to help end the genocide in the past 15 months.

On the contrary, it has done everything in its power to shield Israel from accountability. For example, it has used its veto power four times, most recently on November 20, to prevent the UN Security Council from passing a resolution demanding a ceasefire.

It also voted against the UN General Assembly resolution, supported by 154 member states, calling for an immediate end to Israel’s war on Gaza. It is also attempting to punish the ICC for issuing warrants against Israeli leaders, with the House of Representatives passing a bill to sanction the court.

As such, it seems as long as the US military, political and financial support for Israel continues, there is nothing supporters of Palestine can do to bring the suffering of the Palestinian people to an end or ensure that their basic human rights are respected.

Thankfully, however, the past 15 months were not marked only by losses and disappointment. Supporters of Palestine have also scored important political, legal and electoral victories in this time.

“The Palestinian cause has more support in the global public square today than ever before.
“Israel is becoming a pariah. And this matters.”

Most importantly, despite the world’s inability to put an end to Israel’s genocide and lawless occupation, the Palestinian cause has more support in the global public square today than ever before. Israel is becoming a pariah. And this matters.

Even in US, people take to streets
Indeed, even in America, where politicians seem committed to protecting Israel at any cost, people have regularly taken to the streets to demand an end to the brutal war on Gaza’s population.

American universities, from coast to coast, have been taken over by Gaza solidarity encampments. While most of these protests were crushed with force with many of their participants severely punished, they still managed to show the world that American people do not support genocide.

They also made American people pay attention to what their country is funding in Gaza and helped shift the public opinion against the genocide.

In Western Europe, another traditional support base of Israel, Palestine has also started receiving unprecedented support at both official and grassroots levels.

Sure, the European dependence on the US and Israel’s historic ties to and extensive lobbying investment in most European nations, means official support for Israel’s war is still strong on the continent.

The German government, for example, has been unwavering in its support for Israel since the very beginning of the genocide, and to this day supports and defends all actions of the Netanyahu government.

But pro-Palestinian and anti-genocide voices gained significant prominence across Europe’s political, legal, media, entertainment and economic sectors, as well as in unions, academia and among students, gradually moving several European governments and leading institutions to stand for international law and Palestinian human rights.

26,000 demonstrations
According to the data gathered by the European Palestinian Information Center (EPAL), there have been more than 26,000 demonstrations and other activities in support of Palestinian rights in 619 cities across 20 European countries during the first year of the genocidal Israeli war on Gaza.

“A growing call for justice in Palestine coming from the European public, European governments are starting to slowly show support for the struggle.”

In response to this growing call for justice in Palestine coming from the European public, European governments are starting to slowly show support for the struggle.

Belgium, Ireland and Spain officially sided with South Africa in the genocide case against Israel. Spain and Ireland also recognised the Palestinian state, bringing the number of EU nations to do so to 10.

French President Emmanuel Macron has called for an arms export halt and the UK has suspended some licences. Ireland has been so vocal in its condemnation of the genocide that Israel has recently decided to close its embassy in the country.

In electoral politics, despite the overall rise of the right and obvious successes of right-wing parties in various elections, supporters of Palestine have also made significant gains across several European countries in the past year.

The French national elections held in mid-2024, for example, saw the left-wing France Unbowed, whose leader Jean-Luc Melenchon played a key role in organising pro-Palestine demonstrations in the country, emerge victorious. The pro-Palestinian party also secured 11 seats in the European Parliament.

Pro-Palestine voices also made important gains in the European Parliamentary elections. Sweden’s Left Party, for example, which enjoys strong support from Sweden’s Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim minorities due to its active advocacy for Palestine, gained two seats. Denmark also elected several vocally pro-Palestine representatives.

‘Independence Alliance’ pressures UK
In the United Kingdom, where weekly demonstrations calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to the occupation attracted tens of thousands of people, five pro-Palestinian candidates — including former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn — won seats in last year’s parliamentary elections. These MPs later formed a parliamentary grouping dubbed “Independence Alliance” and started pressuring Keir Starmer’s Labour government to support a ceasefire in Gaza and condemn Israel’s war crimes.

In Austria, pro-Palestine candidates participated in the September national election under the name “Gaza list: Voices against genocide” after securing enough endorsements to get their names on the ballot in seven out of nine states.

They not only managed to bring attention to the genocide in Gaza within the Austrian political conversation, but actually secured nearly  20,000 votes in the election, showing the growing strength of pro-Palestinian voices in the traditionally pro-Israel nation.

Those fighting for justice in Palestine also secured important legal victories in the past year.

In Italy, supporters of Palestinian rights won a case in the Supreme Court of Appeal against the Italian state television network, “Rai”, which had incorrectly referred to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in a news bulletin. The judge ruled that Rai must publicly correct its mistake in a subsequent bulletin, stating that Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel.

Meanwhile, anti-genocide activists filed a lawsuit against the Dutch government to halt arms exports to Israel in light of its conduct in Gaza. The Dutch state television aired the court proceedings live, which raised significant awareness among the Dutch public about the country’s role in facilitating Israel’s genocidal war.

Another prominent legal action in support of Palestine was the cases filed by the Hind Rajab Foundation, established in Belgium last September, at the ICC and several local courts against Israeli soldiers who took part in the Gaza genocide.

1000 Israeli soldiers named for war crimes
The foundation, named after the six-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli tank fire in Gaza as she was stuck in a car filled with the dead bodies of her relatives, sent to the ICC a list containing the names of 1000 Israeli soldiers suspected of taking part in war crimes in the besieged Strip. The foundation collected evidence against the accused Israeli soldiers through various means, including their personal social media pages, where they boasted about committing crimes against Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

The foundation has also been tracking the movements of Israeli soldiers in foreign countries and filing cases against them in local courts. It located and filed complaints against suspected war criminals vacationing in Brazil, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Belgium, the Netherlands, Serbia, Ireland, Cyprus and most recently Sweden.

The actions of the foundation pushed Israel to instruct its soldiers to tread carefully when planning vacations abroad, and strengthened its international pariah status.

Meanwhile, the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement also had significant success in curtailing support for Israel in the past year.

“While the global community has not yet been successful in bringing an end to Israel’s crimes, relentless advocacy by activists from around the world has brought us closer than ever to achieving justice for the Palestinian people.”

According to a Reuters analysis published in November, several of Europe’s biggest financial firms have reduced their links to Israeli companies or those with ties to the country, due to pressures from activists and governments to end the war in Gaza.

UN Trade and Development data showed overall foreign direct investment into Israel fell by 29 percent in 2023 — to its lowest level since 2016.

Relentless advocacy by activists
In short, while the global community has not yet been successful in bringing an end to Israel’s crimes, relentless advocacy by activists from around the world has brought us closer than ever to achieving justice for the Palestinian people.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza, committed in plain sight and documented in great detail, has greatly changed public perceptions of the Israel-Palestine conflict around the world. Even if the US does not seem any closer to abandoning its support for the settler colony, the international opinion is rapidly shifting in favour of Palestine.

The tide is undoubtedly changing, but the fight is far from over. It is imperative that Palestinians and their supporters continue exposing the truth about Israel’s war crimes, illegal occupation, and ethnic cleansing operations, until Palestine is free and Israel has been held accountable for the many crimes it committed and continues to commit against the long-suffering Palestinian people.

Majed al-Zeer is the chair of the European Palestinian Council for Political Relations (EUPAC). This article is republished from Al Jazeera.

An indictment of NZ’s settler colonial and ‘Five Eyes’ spy paranoia over political critics

By
David Robie
-
0
A protest over a controversial and widely condemned series of heavily armed nationwide raids mostly targeting Māori, including Tūhoe people
A protest over a controversial and widely condemned series of heavily armed nationwide raids mostly targeting Māori, including Tūhoe people in the remote Te Urewera, under the Supression of Terrorism Act in 2007. Although 17 peole were initially arrested, the police scenario of a "coordinated major terrorism threat" fell apart. Image: John Miller/The Enemy Within

REVIEW: By David Robie

Four months ago, a group of lawyers in Aotearoa New Zealand called for a little reported inquiry into New Zealand spy agencies over whether there has been possible assistance for Israel’s war in Gaza.

In a letter to the chief of intelligence and security (IGIS) on 12 September 2024, three lawyers argued that the country was in danger of aiding international war crimes, reported RNZ News.

Inspector-General Brendan Horsley, who had previously indicated he would look into conflict-related spying this year, confirmed he would consider the request, according to the report.

At least one of the lawyers was confident of a positive response, said the news report.

“I’m actually very optimistic,” noted University of Auckland associate professor Treasa Dunworth in a media interview about their argument that New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) and Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) intelligence might be making its way to Israel via the US, “because our request is very, detailed, backed up with credible evidence, [and] is very careful.”

But she got a disappointing result. A month later, on October 9 — just seven weeks before the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Foreign Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity — Inspector-General Horsley ruled out an inquiry at this time.

He said in a statement he did not want to “stop the clock” and tie up his office’s “modest resources to a deeper review of activity I have already been monitoring” while armed conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine were currently “active and dynamic”.

Rapid deterioration
Yet rapidly the 15-month Israeli war has deteriorated since then with President-elect Donald Trump due to take office in Israel’s main backer the United States later this month on January 20.

As the humanitarian situation in Gaza worsens with intensified attacks on hospitals and civilians, a breakdown of law and order at the border, and more than 50 complaints filed against Israel soldiers for war crimes in multiple countries, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has urged medical professionals worldwide to sever all ties with the pariah state.

Ironically, the New Zealand intelligence “debate” has coincided with the publication of a new book that has debunked the view that the SIS and GCSB have been working in the interests of New Zealand. The reality, argues social justice movement historian and activist Maire Leadbeater in The Enemy Within: The Human Cost of the State Surveillance in Aotearoa/New Zealand is that these agencies have been working in the interests of the so-called “Five Eyes” partners, including the United States.

Her essential argument in this robust and comprehensive 427-page book is that New Zealand’s state surveillance has been part of a structure of state control that “serves to undermine movements for social change and marginalise or punish those who challenge the established order. It had a deeply destructive impact on democracy.”

As she states, her primary focus is on the work of New Zealand’s main intelligence agencies, the SIS and the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) “and their forerunners, the political police”.

Activist author Maire Leadbeater
Activist author and historian Maire Leadbeater with retired trade unionist Robert Reid at the Auckland book launching last November . . . her latest work exposes state spying on issues of peace, anti-conscription, anti-nuclear, decolonisation, unemployed workers and left trade unionism and socialist and communist thought in Aotearoa New Zealand. Image: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report

The author explains that she is not concerned with the “socially useful work of the contemporary police in the detection of criminal activity, including politically motivated crime”. She notes also that unlike the domestic spies, police detection work is subject to detailed warrants, there is due process over arrests, and the process is open to public scrutiny.

The Enemy Within, by Maire Leadbeater.
The Enemy Within, by Maire Leadbeater. Image: Potton & Burton

Leadbeater points out that while New Zealand experience with terrorism has been limited, neither of the country’s two main intelligence agencies were much help in investigating the three notorious examples — the unsolved 1984 Wellington Trades Hall bombing that killed one, the 1985 bombing of the Greenpeace environmental flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland that also killed one (but the casualties could easily have been higher), and the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings that murdered 51.

The regular police were the key investigators in all three cases.

Also, there is the failure of the SIS to discover Mossad agents operating in NZ on fake passports.

Working for ‘Five Eyes’ interests
Instead of working for the benefit of New Zealand, the intelligence agencies were set up to work closely with the country’s traditional allies and the so-called “Five Eyes” network — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.

An example of this was Algerian professor and parliamentarian Ahmed Zaoui who arrived in New Zealand in 2002 as an asylum seeker after a military coup against the elected government in his home country. Within nine days of arriving, his confidentiality was breached and he was falsely branded by The New Zealand Herald as an “international terrorism suspect”.

A 24-hour vigil in support of Algerian asylum seeker Ahmed Zaoui
A 24-hour vigil in support of Algerian asylum seeker Ahmed Zaoui outside Mt Eden Prison in October 2003 organised by the Free Ahmed Zaoui and Justice for Asylum Seekers groups. Image: Amnesty International/The Enemy Within

He was jailed for two years without charge (part of that time held in solitary confinement) because of an SIS-imposed National Security Risk certificate and this could have have led to “deportation of this honourable man” but for the tireless work of his lawyers and a well-informed public campaign, as told by Leadbeater in this book, and also by journalist Selwyn Manning in his 2004 book I Almost Forgot about the Moon: The Disinformation Campaign Against Ahmed Zaoui.

Set free and granted asylum, he later became a New Zealand citizen in 2014. (However, on a visit to Algeria in 2023 he was arrested at gunpoint in a house in Médéa and charged with “subversion”).

Leadbeater says a strong case could be made that New Zealand’s democracy “would be stronger and more viable without the repressive laws that currently support the secretive operations of the SIS and the GCSB”. The author laments that the resources and focus of the intelligence agencies have focused too much, and wastefully, on ordinary people who are perceived to be “dissenters”.

“Dissent is the lifeblood of democracy but SIS operations targeted many of our brightest and best, damaging their personal and professional lives in the process,” Leadbeater says.

Among those who have been targeted have been the author herself, and others in her “left-wing family milieu” — including her late brother longtime Green Party foreign affairs spokesperson Keith Locke, as well as her parents Elsie and Jack, originally Communist Party activists prior to 1956.

The core of the book is based on primary sources, including declassified police records held in the National Archives and the declassified records of the SIS which have been released to individual activists – including her and she discovered she had been spied on since the age of 10 due to state paranoia.

At the launch of her book in Auckland last November, guest speaker and retired First Union general secretary Robert Reid — whose file also features in the book — said what a fitting way the narrative begins by outlining the important role the Locke family have played in Aotearoa over the many years.

The final chapter is devoted to another “Person of interest: Keith Locke” – “Maire’s much-loved friend and comrade.”

“In between these pages is a treasure trove of commentary and stories of the development of the surveillance state in the settler colony of NZ and the impact that this has had on the lives of ordinary — no, extra-ordinary — people within this country,” Reid said.

“The book could almost be described as a political romp from the settler colonisation of New Zealand through the growth of the workers movement and socialist and communist ideology from the late 1800s until today.”

Surveillance stories and files
Among others whose surveillance stories and files have been featured are trade unionist and former Socialist Action League activist Mike Treen; Halt All Racist Tours founder Trevor Richards; economics lecturer Dr Wolfgang Rosenberg’s sons George and Bill; Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA) organiser Murray Horton; antiwar activist and Peace Movement research Owen Wilkes; investigative journalist Nicky Hager; Dr Bill Sutch, who was tried and acquitted on a charge laid under the Official Secrets Act in 1975; and internet entrepreneur and political activist Kim Dotcom.

State paranoia in New Zealand was driven by issues of peace, anti-conscription, anti-nuclear, decolonisation, unemployed workers and left trade unionism and “socialist and communist thought”.

Leadbeater reflects that she had never accepted that “anyone in my family ever threatened state security. Moreover, the solidarity, antinuclear and anti-apartheid organisations that I took part in should not have been spied on. Such groups were and are a vital part of a healthy democracy.”

At one stage when many activists were seeking copies of their surveillance files in the mid-2000s through OIA requests or later under the Privacy Act, I also applied due to my association with several of the protagonists in this book and my involvement as a writer on decolonisation and environmental justice issues.

I merely received a “neither confirm or deny” form letter on the existence of a file, and never bothered to reapply later when information became more readily available.

‘A subversive in Kanaky’: An article about David Robie’s first arrest by the French military in January 1987
‘A subversive in Kanaky’: An article about David Robie’s surveilance and first arrest by the French military in January 1987. Published in the February edition of Islands Business (Fiji-based regional news magazine). Image: David Robie/RNZ Pacific/ Lydia Lewis

But I have had my own brushes with surveillance and threatened arrest as a journalist in global settings such as New Caledonia, including when I was detained by soldiers in January 1987 for taking photographs of French military camps for a planned report about the systematic intimidation of pro-independence Kanak villagers.

This was perfectly legal, of course, and the attempt by authorities to silence me did not work; my articles appeared on the front page of the New Zealand Sunday Times the following weekend and featured on the cover of Fiji’s Islands Business news magazine.

Watched become the watchers
The structure of The Enemy Within is in three parts. As the author explains, the first part focuses on the period from 920 to the end of the First World War, and the second on the impact of the Cold War and the Western anti-communist hysteria between 1945 and 1955.

The final part covers the period from 1955 to the present, when the intelligence and security services have been under greater public scrutiny and faced campaigns for their reform or abolition.

As Leadbeater notes, “the watched, to some extent, have become the watchers”.

Because of my Asia-Pacific and decolonisation interests, I found a chapter on “colonial repression in Samoa” and the Black Saturday massacre of the Mau resistance of particular interest and a shameful stain on NZ history.

As Leadbeater notes, it was an “unexpected find in the Archives New Zealand” to stumble across a record of the surveillance of the “citizens who mounted an opposition to the New Zealand government’s colonial rule in Samoa”.

She pays tribute to the “vibrant solidarity movement” in the late 1920s and early 1930s, inspired by the peaceful Mau movement and its motto “Samoa mo Samoa” — Samoa for the Samoans — in their resistance to New Zealand’s colonial project.

This solidarity movement was in the face of a “prevailing attitude of white settlement” and its leaders were influenced by the Parihaka resistance of the 1880s.

Leadbeater is critical of New Zealand media, such as The New Zealand Herald, for siding with the colonial establishment and becoming “positively hostile to the Mau movement”.

New Zealand administrators under the League of Mandate to govern Samoa following German rule were arrogant and regarded Samoans as “inferior” and were “aghast” at Samoan and European leaders collaborating in resistance.

The leaders of the women's Mau
The leaders of the women’s Mau in Samoa: Tuimaliifano (from left), Masiofo Tamasese, Rosabel Nelson and Faumuina. Image: Francis Joseph Gleeson/Alexander Turnbull Library/The Enemy Within

Black Saturday massacre
On 28 December 1929, what became dubbed the “Black Saturday massacre” happened in Apia. A peaceful Mau procession marches to the Apia wharf to welcome home exiled trader Alfred Smyth.

Police tried to arrest the Mau secretary, Mata’ūtia Karaunu, but the marchers protected him. More police were despatched to “assert colonial authority”, shots were fired at the crowd and in the upheaval a police constable was clubbed to death.

A police sergeant the fired a Lewis machine gun from the police station over the heads of the crowd, while other police fired directly into the crowd with their rifles.

Paramount chief Tupua Tamasese Lealofi III, dressed in white and calling for peace, was mortally wounded and at least eight other marchers were also killed. The massacre was chronicled in journalist Michael Field’s books Mau and later Black Saturday: New Zealand’s Tragic Blunders in Samoa.

Protests followed and the Mau Movement was declared a “seditious organisation” and the wearing of Mau outfits or badges became illegal.

A crackdown ensued on Mau activists with heavy surveillance and harassment and in New Zealand public figures and community leaders called for an “independent inquiry into Samoan affairs”.

Eventually, the Labour Party victory in the 1935 elections changed the dynamic and the following year the Mau was recognised as a legitimate political movement.

After the Second World War, New Zealand became committed to self-government in Western Samoa with indigenous custom and tradition “as an important foundation”. However, full independence did not come until 1962.

Four decades later, in 2002, Prime Minister Helen Clark formally apologised to the people of Samoa for the “inept and incompetent early administration of Samoa by New Zealand”.

She cited officials allowing the “influenza” ship Talune to dock in Apia in 1918, and the Black Saturday massacre as key examples of this incompetence.

However, Leadbeater notes that the “saga of surveillance and sedition charges” outlined in her book could well be added to the list. She adds that Samoans remember the Mau Movement and its martyrs with “pride and gratitude”.

Chapter one of colonial shame
“For New Zealanders, this chapter in our colonial history is one of shame that should be far better known and understood. The New Zealand Samoa Defence League was ahead of its time, and thankfully so.”

Leadbeater notes in her book that the SIS budget alone in 2021 was about $100 million with about 400 staff. Yet the intelligence services have been spending this sport of money for more than a century looking for “subversives and terrorists” — but in the wrong places.

This book is an excellent tribute to the many activists and dissidents who have had their lives disrupted and hounded by state spies, and is essential reading for all those committed to transparent democracy.

Following her section on more contemporary events and massive surveillance failures and wrongs, such as the 2007 Tūhoe raids, Leadbeater calls for a massive rethink on New Zealand’s approach to security.

“It is time to leave crime, including terrorist crime, to the country’s police and court system, with their built-in accountability procedures,” she concludes.

“It is time for the state to stop spying on society’s critics.”

• The Enemy Within: The Human Cost of State Surveillance in Aotearoa/New Zealand, by Maire Leadbeater. Potton & Burton, 2024. 427 pages.

Caitlin Johnstone: Biden administration finally declares that a genocide is happening – in Sudan

By
Cafe Pacific Publisher
-
0

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

The Biden administration, which has been intimately complicit in the genocidal atrocities being perpetrated in Gaza for the last 15 months, has just determined that a genocide is being committed in Sudan.

Yesterday the Biden administration formally accused the Sudanese paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of committing genocide in the civil war that has been ravaging the country since April 2023, announcing sanctions on the group’s leader Mohammad Hamdan Daglo Mousa along with seven RSF-affiliated companies.

“The RSF and RSF-aligned militias have continued to direct attacks against civilians,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken moralised in a statement regarding the decision, adding, “The RSF and allied militias have systematically murdered men and boys  — even infants  – on an ethnic basis, and deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence.


The Biden administration on genocide.     Audio/video: Caitlin Johnstone

“Those same militias have targeted fleeing civilians, murdering innocent people escaping conflict, and prevented remaining civilians from accessing lifesaving supplies.”

Sometimes all you can do is stare wordlessly at the absolute gall of these freaks.

This is after all the same Antony Blinken who just flatly denied that a genocide is taking place in Gaza in his final interviews with the press a few days ago, even as mainstream Western human rights institutions like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch unambiguously accuse Israel of committing genocidal crimes of extermination against Palestinians in the enclave.

This is the same Biden administration which has adamantly insisted on continuing to supply Israel with the weapons it depends on to continue its genocidal onslaught in Gaza, despite mountains of undeniable evidence that it is deliberately targeting civilians with deadly force and deliberately cutting off civilians from food, clean water and medical supplies.

And this is also the same Biden administration that has been sending weapons to the United Arab Emirates while conveniently ignoring the fact that the UAE is sending money and weapons to the RSF to use for its atrocities in Sudan.

“The UAE has been covertly shipping weapons to the RSF, but that hasn’t stopped the Biden administration from pushing forward major arms sales to Abu Dhabi,” notes Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp regarding the announcement.

So the US is indirectly backing the genocidal atrocities it now denounces in Sudan, while aggressively defending the genocidal atrocities it is directly backing in Gaza.

This announcement comes as Biden and his handlers push through one last $8 billion weapons shipment to Israel in the last days of his term, a final blood-soaked punctuation mark on an ugly legacy of mass murder throughout Biden’s far-too-long political career.

And we can’t realistically expect it to get any better when the next soulless empire manager takes office.

In a radio interview on Monday, president-elect Trump boasted of being “the best friend that Israel ever had,” pointing to the numerous concessions he made to the Zionist state during his first time in office.

“Well, I’m the best friend that Israel ever had,” Trump said. “You look at what happened with all of the things that I’ve gotten, including Jerusalem being the capital, the embassy getting built.”

Trump then reiterated his threat to Hamas that there will be “hell to pay” if the Israeli hostages are not released by the time he takes office, following earlier statements which suggested the US could become directly involved in the bombing of Gaza during Trump’s term.

The US government does not care about genocide, regardless of what bloodthirsty ghoul takes office or what political party they happen to belong to.

Anytime genocide rears its ugly head in a way that is convenient for the interests of the empire, the empire at best will look the other way and at worst join right in with the slaughter.

The empire itself is the problem. When the empire remains murderous even after you get rid of the official elected leaders currently overseeing the murderousness, this tells you that it is the empire itself that’s the problem.

The empire is what needs to go.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

Five Pacific region geopolitical ‘betrayals’ in 2024

By
David Robie
-
0

COMMENTARY: By David Robie

With the door now shut on 2024, many will heave a sigh of relief and hope for better things this year.

Decolonisation issues involving the future of Kanaky New Caledonia and West Papua — and also in the Middle East with controversial United Nations votes by some Pacific nations in the middle of a livestreamed genocide — figured high on the agenda in the past year along with the global climate crisis and inadequate funding rescue packages.

Asia Pacific Report looks at some of the issues and developments during the year that were regarded by critics as “betrayals”:

Palestine -
Palestine – “a moral litmus test for the world” . . . a Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre placard protesting against Fiji’s votes at the United Nations. Image: APR/FWCC

1. Fiji and PNG ‘betrayal’ UN votes over Palestine

Just two weeks before Christmas, the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to demand an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip under attack from Israel — but three of the isolated nine countries that voted against were Pacific island states, including Papua New Guinea.

The assembly passed a resolution on December 11 demanding an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, which was adopted with 158 votes in favour from the 193-member assembly and nine votes against with 13 abstentions.

Of the nine countries voting against, the three Pacific nations that sided with Israel and its relentless backer United States were Nauru, Papua New Guinea and Tonga.

The other countries that voted against were Argentina, Czech Republic, Hungary and Paraguay.

Thirteen abstentions included Fiji, which had previously controversially voted with Israel, Micronesia, and Palau. Supporters of the resolution in the Pacific region included Australia, New Zealand, and Timor-Leste.

Ironically, it was announced a day before the UNGA vote that the United States will spend more than US$864 million (3.5 billion kina) on infrastructure and military training in Papua New Guinea over 10 years under a defence deal signed between the two nations in 2023, according to PNG’s Foreign Minister Justin Tkatchenko.

Any connection? Your guess is as good as mine. Certainly it is very revealing how realpolitik is playing out in the region with an “Indo-Pacific buffer” against China.

However, the deal actually originated almost two years earlier, in May 2023, with the size of the package reflecting a growing US security engagement with Pacific island nations as it seeks to counter China’s inroads in the vast ocean region.

Noted BenarNews, a US soft power news service in the region, the planned investment is part of a defence cooperation agreement granting the US military “unimpeded access” to develop and deploy forces from six ports and airports, including Lombrum Naval Base.

Two months before PNG’s vote, the UNGA overwhelmingly passed a resolution demanding that the Israeli government end its occupation of Palestinian territories within 12 months — but half of the 14 countries that voted against were from the Pacific.

Affirming an International Court of Justice (ICJ) opinion requested by the UN that deemed the decades-long occupation unlawful, the opposition from seven Pacific nations further marginalised the island region from world opinion against Israel.

Several UN experts and officials warned against Israel becoming a global “pariah” state over its 15 month genocidal war on Gaza.

The final vote tally was 124 member states in favour and 14 against, with 43 nations abstaining. The Pacific countries that voted with Israel and its main ally and arms-supplier United States against the Palestinian resolution were Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Palau, Tonga and Tuvalu.

Flags of decolonisation in Suva, Fiji
Flags of decolonisation in Suva, Fiji . . . the Morning Star flag of West Papua (colonised by Indonesia) and the flag of Palestine (militarily occupied illegally and under attack from Israel). Image: APR

In February, Fiji faced widespread condemnation after it joined the US as one of the only two countries — branded as the “outliers” — to support Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territory in an UNGA vote over an International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion over Israel’s policies in the occupied territories.

Condemning the US and Fiji, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki declared: “Ending Israel’s impunity is a moral, political and legal imperative.”

Fiji’s envoy at the UN, retired Colonel Filipo Tarakinikini, defended the country’s stance, saying the court “fails to take account of the complexity of this dispute, and misrepresents the legal, historical, and political context”.

However, Fiji NGOs condemned the Fiji vote as supporting “settler colonialism” and long-standing Fijian diplomats such as Kaliopate Tavola and Robin Nair said Fiji had crossed the line by breaking with its established foreign policy of “friends-to-all-and-enemies-to-none”.

Indonesian military forces on patrol in the Oksop regency of the West Papua region. Image: ULMWP

2. West Papuan self-determination left in limbo
For the past decade, Pacific Island Forum countries have been trying to get a fact-finding human mission deployed to West Papua. But they have encountered zero progress with continuous roadblocks being placed by Jakarta.

This year was no different in spite of the appointment of Fiji and Papua New Guinea’s prime ministers to negotiate such a visit.

Pacific leaders have asked for the UN’s involvement over reported abuses as the Indonesian military continues its battles with West Papuan independence fighters.

A highly critical UN Human Right Committee report on Indonesia released in May highlighted “systematic reports about the use of torture” and “extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances of Indigenous Papuan people”.

But the situation is worse now since President Prabowo Subianto, the former general who has a cloud of human rights violations hanging over his head, took office in October.

Fiji’s Sitiveni Rabuka and Papua New Guinea’s James Marape were appointed by the Melanesian Spearhead Group in 2023 as special envoys to push for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ visit directly with Indonesia’s president.

Prabowo taking up the top job in Jakarta has filled West Papuan advocates and activists with dread as this is seen as marking a return of “the ghost of Suharto” because of his history of alleged atrocities in West Papua, and also in Timor-Leste before independence.

Already Prabowo’s acts since becoming president with restoring the controversial transmigration policies, reinforcing and intensifying the military occupation, fuelling an aggressive “anti-environment” development strategy, have heralded a new “regime of brutality”.

And Marape and Rabuka, who pledged to exiled indigenous leader Benny Wenda in Suva in February 2023 that he would support the Papuans “because they are Melanesians”, have been accused of failing the West Papuan cause.

Protesters at Molodoï, Strasbourg, demanding the release of Kanak indigenous political prisoners being detained in France
Protesters at Molodoï, Strasbourg, demanding the release of Kanak indigenous political prisoners being detained in France pending trial for their alleged role in the pro-independence riots in May 2024. Image: @67Kanaky/X

3. France rolls back almost four decades of decolonisation ‘progress’
When pro-independence protests erupted into violent rioting in Kanaky New Caledonia on May 13, creating havoc and destruction in the capital of Nouméa and across the French Pacific territory with 14 people dead (mostly indigenous Kanaks), intransigent French policies were blamed for having betrayed Kanak aspirations for independence.

I was quoted at the time by The New Zealand Herald and RNZ Pacific of blaming France for having “lost the plot” since 2020.


David Robie on Kanaky Independence.    Video: GreenLeft Magazine

While acknowledging the goodwill and progress that had been made since the 1988 Matignon accords and the Nouméa pact a decade later following the bloody 1980s insurrection, the French government lost the self-determination trajectory after two narrowly defeated independence referendums and a third vote boycotted by Kanaks because of the covid pandemic.

This third vote with less than half the electorate taking part had no credibility, but Paris insisted on bulldozing constitutional electoral changes that would have severely disenfranchised the indigenous vote. More than 36 years of constructive progress had been wiped out.

“It’s really three decades of hard work by a lot of people to build, sort of like a future for Kanaky New Caledonia, which is part of the Pacific rather than part of France,” I was quoted as saying.

France had had three prime ministers since 2020 and none of them seemed to have any “real affinity” for indigenous issues, particularly in the South Pacific, in contrast to some previous leaders.

In the wake of a snap general election in mainland France, when President Emmanuel Macron lost his centrist mandate and is now squeezed between the polarised far right National Rally and the left coalition New Popular Front, the controversial electoral reform was quietly scrapped.

New French Overseas Minister Manual Valls has heralded a new era of negotiation over self-determination. In November, he criticised Macron’s “stubbornness’ in an interview with the French national daily Le Parisien, blaming him for “ruining 36 years of dialogue, of progress”.

But New Caledonia is not the only headache for France while pushing for its own version of an “Indo-Pacific” strategy. Pro-independence French Polynesian President Moetai Brotherson and civil society leaders have called on the UN to bring Paris to negotiations over a timetable for decolonisation.

West Papuan leader Benny Wenda (left) and Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka
West Papuan leader Benny Wenda (left) and Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka . . . “We will support them [ULMWP] because they are Melanesians.” Rabuka also had a Pacific role with New Caledonia. Image: Fiji govt/RNZ Pacific

4. Pacific Islands Forum also fails Kanak aspirations
Kanaks and the Pacific’s pro-decolonisation activists had hoped that an intervention by the Pacific Islands Forum in support of the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) would enhance their self-determination stocks.However, they were disappointed. And their own internal political divisions have not made things any easier.

On the eve of the three-day fact-finding delegation to the territory in October, Fiji’s Rabuka was already warning the local government (led by pro-independence Louis Mapou to “be reasonable” in its demands from Paris.

In other words, back off on the independence demands. Rabuka was quoted by RNZ Pacific reporter Lydia Lewis as saying, “look, don’t slap the hand that has fed you”.

Rabuka and Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown and then Tongan counterpart Hu’akavameiliku Siaosi Sovaleni visited the French territory not to “interfere” but to “lower the temperature”.

But an Australian proposal for a peacekeeping force under the Australian-backed Pacific Policing Initiative (PPI) fell flat, and the mission was generally considered a failure for Kanak indigenous aspirations.

Taking the world's biggest problem to the world’s highest court for global climate justice
Taking the planet’s biggest problem to the world’s highest court for global climate justice. Image: X/@ciel_tweets

5. Climate crisis — the real issue and geopolitics
In spite of the geopolitical pressures from countries, such as the US, Australia and France, in the region in the face of growing Chinese influence, the real issue for the Pacific remains climate crisis and what to do about it.

Controversy marked an A$140 million aid pact signed between Australia and Nauru last month in what was being touted as a key example of the geopolitical tightrope being forced on vulnerable Pacific countries.

This agreement offers Nauru direct budgetary support, banking services and assistance with policing and security. The strings attached? Australia has been granted the right to veto any agreement with a third country such as China.

Critics have compared this power of veto to another agreement signed between Australia and Tuvalu in 2023 which provided Australian residency opportunities and support for climate mitigation. However, in return Australia was handed guarantees over security.

The previous month, November, was another disappointment for the Pacific when it was “once again ignored” at the UN COP29 climate summit in the capital Baku of oil and natural gas-rich Azerbaijan.

The Suva-based Pacific Islands Climate Action Network (PICAN) condemned the outcomes as another betrayal, saying that the “richest nations turned their backs on their legal and moral obligations” at what had been billed as the “finance COP”.

The new climate finance pledge of a US$300 billion annual target by 2035 for the global fight against climate change was well short of the requested US$1 trillion in aid.

Climate campaigners and activist groups branded it as a “shameful failure of leadership” that forced Pacific nations to accept the “token pledge” to prevent the negotiations from collapsing.

Much depends on a climate justice breakthrough with Vanuatu’s landmark case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) arguing that those harming the climate are breaking international law.

The case seeks an advisory opinion from the court on the legal responsibilities of countries over the climate crisis, and many nations in support of Vanuatu made oral submissions last month and are now awaiting adjudication.

Given the primacy of climate crisis and vital need for funding for adaptation, mitigation and loss and damage faced by vulnerable Pacific countries, former Pacific Islands Forum Secretary-General Meg Taylor delivered a warning:

“Pacific leaders are being side-lined in major geopolitical decisions affecting their region and they need to start raising their voices for the sake of their citizens.”

David Robie is editor of Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific.

‘Ghost of Suharto’ marks Prabowo’s new phase in West Papua occupation

By
Cafe Pacific Publisher
-
0
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto (left) and West Papuan exiled leader Benny Wenda
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto (left) and West Papuan exiled leader Benny Wenda . . . “Foreign governments should not be fooled by Prabowo’s PR campaign.” Image: SCL montage

SPECIAL REPORT: By Paul Gregoire

United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) provisional government interim president Benny Wenda has warned that since Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto took office in October, he has been proven right in having remarked, after the politician’s last February election, that his coming marks the return of “the ghost of Suharto” — the brutal dictator who ruled over the nation for three decades.

Wenda, an exiled West Papuan leader, outlined in a December 16 statement that at that moment the Indonesian forces were carrying out ethnic cleansing in multiple regencies, as thousands of West Papuans were being forced out of their villages and into the bush by soldiers.

The entire regency of Oksop had been emptied, with more than 1200 West Papuans displaced since an escalation began in Nduga regency in 2018.

Displaced Oksop villagers in West Papua
Displaced Oksop villagers . . . Indonesian forces have been carrying out ethnic cleansing in multiple regencies of the colonised region of West Papua. Image: ULMWP

Prabowo coming to top office has a particular foreboding for the West Papuans, who have been occupied by Indonesia since 1963, as over his military career — which spanned from 1970 to 1998 and saw rise him to the position of general, as well as mainly serve in Kopassus (special forces) — the current president perpetrated multiple alleged atrocities across East Timor and West Papua.

According to Wenda, the incumbent Indonesian president can “never clean the blood from his hands for his crimes as a general in West Papua and East Timor”. He further makes clear that Prabowo’s acts since taking office reveal that he is set on “creating a new regime of brutality” in the country of his birth.

Enhancing the occupation
“Foreign governments should not be fooled by Prabowo’s PR campaign,” Wenda made certain in mid-December.

“He is desperately seeking international legitimacy through his international tour, empty environmental pledges and the amnesty offered to various prisoners, including 18 West Papuans and the remaining imprisoned members of the Bali Nine.”

Former Indonesian President Suharto ruled over the Southeast Asian nation with an iron fist from 1967 until 1998.

In the years prior to his officially taking office, General Suharto oversaw the mass murder of up to 1 million local Communists, he further rigged the 1969 referendum on self-determination for West Papua, so that it failed and he invaded East Timor in 1975.

Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto (left) and West Papuan exiled leader Benny Wenda
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto (left) and West Papuan exiled leader Benny Wenda . . . “Foreign governments should not be fooled by Prabowo’s PR campaign.” Image: SCL montage

Wenda maintains that the proof Prabowo is something of an apparition of Suharto is that he has set about forging “mass displacement, increased militarisation” and “increased deforestation” in the Melanesian region of West Papua.

And he has further restarted the transmigration programme of the Suharto days, which involves Indonesians being moved to West Papua to populate the region.

As Wenda advised in 2015, the initial transmigration programme resulted in West Papuans, who made up 96 percent of the population in 1971, only comprising 49 percent of those living in their own homelands at that current time.

Wenda considers the “occupation was entering a new phase”, when former Indonesian president Joko Widodo split the region of West Papua into five provinces in mid-2022.

Oksop displaced villagers
Oksop displaced villagers seeking refuge in West Papua. Image: ULMWP

And the West Papuan leader advises that Prabowo is set to establish separate military commands in each province, which will provide “a new, more thorough and far-reaching system of occupation”.

West Papua was previously split into two regions, which the West Papuan people did not recognise, as these and the current five provinces are actually Indonesian administrative zones.

“By establishing new administrative divisions, Indonesia creates the pretext for new military posts and checkpoints,” Wenda underscores.

“The result is the deployment of thousands more soldiers, curfews, arbitrary arrests and human rights abuses. West Papua is under martial law.”

Ecocide on a formidable scale
Prabowo paid his first official visit to West Papua as President in November, visiting the Merauke district in South Papua province, which is the site of the world’s largest deforestation project, with clearing beginning in mid-2024, and it will eventually comprise of 2 million deforested hectares turned into giant sugarcane plantations, via the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands.

Five consortiums, including Indonesian and foreign companies, are involved in the project, with the first seedlings having been planted in July. And despite promises that the megaproject would not harm existing forests, these areas are being torn down regardless.

And part of this deforestation includes the razing of forest that had previously been declared protected by the government.

A similar programme was established in Merauke district in 2011, by Widodo’s predecessor President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who established rice and sugarcane plantations in the region, aiming to turn it into a “future breadbasket for Indonesia”.

However, the plan was a failure, and the project was rather used as a cover to establish hazardous palm oil and pulpwood plantations.

“It is not a coincidence Prabowo has announced a new transmigration programme at the same time as their ecocidal deforestation regime intensifies,” Wenda said in a November 2024 statement. “These twin agendas represent the two sides of Indonesian colonialism in West Papua: exploitation and settlement.”

Wenda added that Jakarta is only interested in West Papuan land and resources, and in exchange, Indonesia has killed at least half a million West Papuans since 1963.

And while the occupying nation is funding other projects via the profits it has been making on West Papuan palm oil, gold and natural gas, the West Papuan provinces are the poorest in the Southeast Asian nation.

Indonesian military forces on patrol in the Oksop regency of the West Papua region
Indonesian military forces on patrol in the Oksop regency of the West Papua region. Image: ULMWP

Independence is still key
The 1962 New York Agreement involved the Netherlands, West Papua’s former colonial rulers, signing over the region to Indonesia. A brief United Nations administrative period was to be followed by Jakarta assuming control of the region on 1 May 1963.

And part of the agreement was that West Papuans undertake the Act of Free Choice, or a 1969 referendum on self-determination.

So, if the West Papuans did not vote to become an autonomous nation, then Indonesian administration would continue.

However, the UN brokered referendum is now referred to as the Act of “No Choice”, as it only involved 1026 West Papuans, handpicked by Indonesia. And under threat of violence, all of these men voted to stick with their colonial oppressors.

Wenda presented The People’s Petition to the UN Human Rights High Commissioner in January 2019, which calls for a new internationally supervised vote on self-determination for the people of West Papua, and it included the signatures of 1.8 million West Papuans, or 70 percent of the Indigenous population.

The exiled West Papuan leader further announced the formation of the West Papua provisional government on 1 December 2020, which involved the establishment of entire departments of government with heads of staff appointed on the ground in the Melanesian province, and Wenda was also named the president of the body.

But with the coming of Prabowo and the recent developments in West Papua, it appears the West Papuan struggle is about to intensify at the same time as the movement for independence becomes increasingly more prominent on the global stage.

“Every element of West Papua is being systematically destroyed: our land, our people, our Melanesian culture identity,” Wenda said in November, in response to the recommencement of Indonesia’s transmigration programme and the massive environment devastation in Merauke.

“This is why it is not enough to speak about the Act of No Choice in 1969: the violation of our self-determination is continuous, renewed with every new settlement programme, police crackdown, or ecocidal development.”

Paul Gregoire is a Sydney-based journalist and writer. He is the winner of the 2021 NSW Council for Civil Liberties Award For Excellence In Civil Liberties Journalism. Prior to Sydney Criminal Lawyers®, Paul wrote for VICE and was news editor at Sydney’s City Hub. Republished with permission.

Caitlin Johnstone: We live in a propaganda nightmare

By
Cafe Pacific Publisher
-
0

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

Awakening from the propaganda matrix is like being a conservative: you’re frequently disgusted with society and where it appears to be headed. But unlike a conservative, you’re disgusted by actual problems instead of imaginary nonsense.

Also unlike a conservative, your problem is not with relatively new societal developments like recent immigration waves and LGBTQ acceptance; your problem is with abusive dynamics which have been plaguing civilization for centuries. Capitalism. Imperialism. Militarism. Settler-colonialism. Genocide. Plutocracy. Exploitation. Consumerism.

Many rightists warn urgently that our society is on the verge of plunging into a nightmarish authoritarian dystopia, but if you’re truly unplugged from the indoctrination of the empire you understand that the dystopia is already here, and has been for a long time.

The overwhelming majority of the people in our society are already thinking, speaking, working, shopping, spending, voting and behaving pretty much exactly how the ruling class wants them to. If they put microchips in our brains which allowed them to fully control our minds, they’d have us moving around in more or less the same way we’ve been moving for generations.

We are seeing increases in authoritarianism as our rulers tighten their grip on power, but those measures are being rolled out to keep the current system in place, not to create a new one. They’re not changing anything about the prison, they’re just installing better locks on the doors.

Until you’ve fully liberated yourself from the indoctrination of the mainstream imperial worldview, you don’t truly understand that this is dystopia. You don’t understand how nightmarish it is to live in a society where everyone is marching to the relentless drumbeat of profit and domination.

You think it’s fine and normal for people to go their whole lives with their entire identities wrapped around their careers and the goals that they have accomplished within them. You don’t notice anything amiss with the way human lives are being psychologically shaped by propaganda and advertising to make them identify primarily as workers and consumers, and for them to be imprisoned or made homeless if they can’t or won’t be hammered into those shapes.


We live in a nightmare.  Video: Caitlin Johnstone

When you’re still plugged into the imperial worldview, you don’t think much about the horrors your government is unleashing upon people in other countries. If you think about politics at all, “foreign policy” is just one of many issues of consideration, and is much less worthy of your attention than whatever hot partisan topic is being pushed in mainstream discourse on any given day.

When you take the blinders off, you’re not able to ignore that stuff anymore. You’re acutely aware that unfathomable suffering is always being unleashed by your rulers upon foreigners whose lives matter just as much as yours does, and that atrocities are being inflicted in your name which are just as horrific as they would be if they were happening in your neighborhood.

These things disgust and outrage you. This whole dystopia does.

The way people in your life mindlessly regurgitate war propaganda about this or that empire-targeted nation. The way movies and TV shows manufacture consent for this hellscape. The way almost every product you interact with came into your life through depraved acts of international exploitation.

The way none of the artists you’ve admired seem remotely interested in truth or justice, serving up nothing but vapid distraction in pretty shapes. The elections. The advertising. The phoniness. The way everyone’s always running around in circles frenetically trying to avoid experiencing even one single moment of true sincerity.

It looks more and more unwholesome the more lucid you become. You look at a US presidential debate, or MrBeast, or Jake Paul staging a glitzy exhibition match with an ancient Mike Tyson, or the way people are using all kinds of exploitative gig economy apps to sell off more and more of their time, labour and dignity in order to survive, and you just want to howl like a wounded animal. Some primordial eruption at this twisted thing our species has become.

This doesn’t mean you become bitter and jaded  —  at least not if you remain dedicated to the experience of truth. All it means is you stop looking for joy and satisfaction in the places this perverse civilization tells you to look for it.

Instead of chasing after this dystopia’s warped definitions of success and trying to look like what you’ve been told a well-adjusted member of society ought to look like, you begin finding enjoyment in real things. Love. Real human connection. The thunderous beauty of the natural world.

The crackling delight of the raw sights, sounds, smells and sensations which come with living a human life on this planet  —  even in the thickest manifestations of our madness. True romance, if you dare.

And as trying as it can be, it’s the only path toward real happiness. None of the people who are plugged into the matrix are really enjoying themselves, as hard as some of them try to pretend otherwise. How could they be?

It’s impossible to be truly happy when deep down you know something’s profoundly wrong. That’s why antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds are being shoveled out like Halloween candy. Everyone’s getting more and more miserable, because you can’t build real lasting happiness on a foundation of propaganda and lies.

The products never satisfy, the false definitions of success never deliver fulfillment, the toil never ends, and the cognitive dissonance grows stronger and stronger.

A devotion to truth can get ugly. It can get uncomfortable. It’s sometimes downright agonising. But it’s the only path toward a healthy world. We can only begin moving toward health by facing the truth, as unpleasant as it might be.

Our future as a conscious species lies on the other side of some confrontations that take us way outside our comfort zones. We come to nirvana by way of samsara.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

How Israel’s embrace of endless war and Zionist supremacy is creating self-inflicted wounds

By
Cafe Pacific Publisher
-
0
"This moment doesn’t represent the triumph of Zionism so much as the beginning of the end. Israel has become an international pariah, led by an incompetent and corrupt government, and it is experiencing a debilitating brain drain." Image: David Robie/APR

ANALYSIS: By Arun Gupta

Israel is riding high after carrying out the most audacious campaign of military conquest of any nation since the 1940s.

Following the October 7, 2023, attacks, Israel has begun an open-ended occupation in Lebanon, seized Syrian territory twice the size of Gaza, wiped 50 Palestinian villages “off the map” in the West Bank, bombed Iran and Yemen, and weathered more than a year of resistance, global revulsion and protest, while carrying out a horrific genocide in Gaza that has no end in sight.

From the beginning, Israel has enjoyed the full support of the Biden administration — militarily, financially, politically, diplomatically and morally. Israel’s extermination of children, families, aid workers, doctors, teachers and artists has earned it only a few occasional peeps of official protest from Washington, while regional powers such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia are trying to have it both ways.

They have reduced economic and political ties with Israel to pacify domestic anger, while quietly aiding it because their governments are aligned with US interests.

But this moment doesn’t represent the triumph of Zionism so much as the beginning of the end. Israel has become an international pariah, led by an incompetent and corrupt government, and it is experiencing a debilitating brain drain.

Its society is riven by multiple fractures, with deep political divisions and intractable conflicts, not just between Jews and Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, or those for or against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government, but between secular Jews and a growing ultra-Orthodox population.

Greater gulf between Israel and world
Meanwhile, the gulf between Israel and the rest of the world has never been deeper. In January, a Tel Aviv University poll showed almost universal backing among Israeli Jews for its war on Palestinians with 95 percent either believing the military was using the right amount of force in Gaza or too little.

Nearly 60 percent support killing all 2.3 million residents of Gaza through starvation.

Outside of the West, opposition to Israeli savagery is nearly universal and has reinvigorated the 2005 call by Palestinian civil society for “boycott, divestments and sanctions against Israel until it complies with international law and universal principles of human rights,” as well as the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel initiated the previous year.

This moment doesn’t represent the triumph of Zionism, so much as the beginning of the end.

On top of this political and economic isolation, Israel’s embrace of endless war and Jewish supremacy is creating self-inflicted wounds. While the country depends on Washington for its power and impunity, no amount of weapons and dollars can prop up a regime festering with rot. Higher taxes, government expenses, inflation, reduced social services, shocking levels of poverty intensified by the war and mounting international pressure — all are exacerbating a brain drain that threatens to enervate the Israeli economy.

Young, well-educated Israelis are fleeing abroad to escape a government power grab in the guise of a proposed judicial “reform” that critics argue would “codify the subjugation of women” and the LGBTQ community. The planned overhaul of the legal system, experts warn, would “pave the way for unbridled corruption, infringement of individual rights and harm to the public interest.”

In 2023, prior to the start of the genocide, one study found Israeli emigration had leaped by 42 percent compared to previous years. The study author warned that losing tens of thousands of high-tech workers, physicians and senior academic faculty “could generate catastrophic consequences for the entire country.”

Close to 1 million Jewish Israelis have dual citizenship, and a high portion of them are bilingual, meaning they can easily emigrate.

Numbers for 2024 are murky, but emigration appears to have turned into a flood. In the first nine months of 2024, Canada approved 7800 work permits for Israelis. That’s five times the rate for all of 2023. During the same period, more than 18,400 Israelis applied for German citizenship, which is more than three times the 5,700 Israelis who did so in 2022. The brain drain extends to Israeli Arabs as well.

An onerous double burden exposed
For many secular Israeli Jews, the war is “the last straw” that has exposed an onerous double burden: They pay taxes and serve in the military, while the far-right government, which relies on religious parties to stay in power, protects ultra-Orthodox men from the draft.

Ending the war will only revive long-broiling secular-religious strife over suffocating religious laws and policies that provide “a vast system of government subsidies, stipends and other benefits” that allows half of Orthodox men to avoid work as full-time yeshiva students.

There are also external pressures. Many Israelis are asking why they would want to live in a pariah state, “a symbol of oppression, immorality and illiberalism,” as New York Times columnist Ezra Klein put it in an interview with Haaretz.

A New Zealand protest outside Auckland Hospital on Friday
A New Zealand protest outside Auckland Hospital on Friday against the Israeli genocide and attacks in hospitals and healthcare workers: “The crisis has come to a head in the government’s proposed budget for 2025, which “includes some of the biggest spending cuts and tax increases Israelis have ever known, in order to finance the war.” The budget slashes spending on health, welfare and aid to the elderly, disabled and Holocaust survivors.” Image: David Robie/APR

One little-reported phenomenon is how campus protests in solidarity with Gaza — which spread to more than 140 US universities and 25 countries by May — supercharged the movement to boycott, divest from and impose sanctions on Israel.

In their wake, the rector of Hebrew University in Jerusalem noted a “tsunami” of boycotts, saying, “I can’t count the number of academic relations that have been suspended or even broken off.” This led to a “barrage” of conference invitations withdrawn, papers pulled from review and funding halted, according to Bloomberg.

Some 20 universities in Europe and Canada have cut ties with Israeli universities and academics since last spring.

Haaretz admits that the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement is “working vigorously and effectively in the cultural realm,” which has made life more difficult for those working in international fields, particularly science and the arts. In October, hundreds of prominent authors signed a letter vowing not to “work with Israeli cultural institutions that are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians.”

Work refusals deepening isolation
Meanwhile, refusals to work with Israel’s film and TV industry are limiting its reach, and boycotts by musicians are deepening its isolation.

The hardest blows to Israel are directly economic. Turkey, a major economic partner with Israel with $8 billion in bilateral trade, has reduced its business with and is under popular pressure to crack down on third-party shipments to Israel. Colombia, Israel’s top supplier of coal, has stopped exports of the fuel that accounts for 20 percent of Israel’s electricity supply. Nor is Israel’s military immune from international opprobrium. Belgium, Spain, Canada, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and Britain have banned or restricted weapons sales. Israeli weapons makers have been nixed from or skipped military trade shows.

For many secular Israeli Jews, the war is ‘the last straw’.

Under pressure “from activists and governments,” many financial firms, including sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and companies in France, Italy, Ireland, Norway, Denmark and the United Kingdom, have divested from Israel or companies connected to the war and occupation.

In June, Israel was dealt an especially painful blow when Intel announced it was suspending work on a $25 billion chip plant that would have employed 12,000 people, although there is no evidence it was connected to the war. Intel Israel has also laid off hundreds of employees, and Samsung Next, which funded 70 Israeli companies and startups over a decade, shut down operations in Tel Aviv in 2024. Pret A Manager dropped plans to open 40 stores. Starbucks and McDonald’s admitted pro-Palestine boycotts have contributed to declining profits.

Israel’s tech industry accounts for 20 percent of gross domestic product and 53 percent of exports. It prides itself as the “startup nation,” but that’s more myth than reality. Over the past decade, Israeli startups have dwindled 45 percent to fewer than 800 in 2023, and only 5 percent of those raise more than $50 million. Israel’s high-tech sector, meanwhile, has slipped to 2018 levels, and venture capital fundraising has sunk by 70 percent. One entrepreneur said the loss of funding was “directly tied to the Gaza War”.

All of this points to Israel edging toward a vicious cycle. As its workforce shrinks in medicine, technology and academia, Israel’s tax base declines, its capacity for innovation and ability to attract talent diminishes, and staying becomes less and less desirable for those remaining.

These problems are compounded by hits to other sectors. Tourism has been virtually wiped out, with an estimated $5.2 billion loss from pre-pandemic levels. Agriculture has seen a 30 percent drop in output that has pushed up the price of meat by 7 percent and produce by 9 percent. Local businesses are on track to record 50 percent more closures in 2024 than in a normal year. And a staggering 29 percent of Israelis now live in poverty, and one in four are food insecure.

Debt insurance has tripled
Israel’s cost of insuring debt has tripled since the genocide began. Foreign direct investment plunged 29 percent in 2023 and probably fell further in 2024, and foreign investors have dumped nearly $13 billion in Israeli stocks and bonds. True to form, Wall Street banks are benefiting from Israel’s pain by notching higher profits from volatility in its bonds and currencies caused by the war. That is costing Israel money, as currency gyrations increase the cost of importing and exporting goods.

Meanwhile, international agencies such as Moody’s have lowered Israel’s credit to a few notches above junk bond rating, citing politics as an economic threat — namely the “high social tensions” resulting from changes to the judiciary and allowing the ultra-Orthodox to avoid military service.

Here, again, the divide between religious and secular Israelis poses perhaps the greatest long-term threat to Israel and the Zionist project. The Haredim have a far higher birth rate than secular Jews, and because community patriarchs keep them poorly educated to control them, it’s estimated that in a decade or so Israel’s high-tech economy will be unsustainable, as its skilled workforce will have evaporated.

A competent government might be able to help the country weather these crises. But Netanyahu’s ruling coalition is singularly focused on “looting” government coffers to reward religious fanatics and violent settlers.

All of this points to Israel edging toward a vicious cycle.

The crisis has come to a head in the government’s proposed budget for 2025, which “includes some of the biggest spending cuts and tax increases Israelis have ever known, in order to finance the war.” The budget slashes spending on health, welfare and aid to the elderly, disabled and Holocaust survivors. At the same time Netanyahu, has been pushing a bill to “subsidise day care for children of full-time yeshiva students who dodge the draft.”

The far right that effectively controls Israel is banking on being able to soak secular Jews for taxes as they do all the fighting and keep the economy humming while trying to subject them to a prejudiced religious judicial system. Arabs and ultra-Orthodox make up 35 percent of Israel’s population, but less than 5% of tech workers.

Israel has wounded itself deeply through external brutality and internal bigotry. Add to that the small but regular cuts that the BDS movement is inflicting on it, and the state has become far more fragile, far more quickly, than many had imagined possible.

Arun Gupta is an investigative reporter who has written for the Guardian, the Daily Beast, the Intercept, The Washington Post, and other publications. This article was first published by TruthDig.

Israel orders patients, staff to ‘evacuate’ last two hospitals in northern Gaza siege – NZ protest

By
Cafe Pacific Publisher
-
0
Mock bodies on the pavement in Te Komititanga Square
Mock bodies on the pavement in Te Komititanga Square in the heart of Auckland's shopping precinct today with a Norwegian tourism ship in the background during a Palestinian New Zealand solidarity protest against Israeli targeting of health professionals. Image: David Robie/APR

Asia Pacific Report

Israel is forcing two hospitals in northern Gaza to evacuate under threat of attack as its ethnic cleansing campaign continues.

Israeli forces have surrounded the Indonesian Hospital, where many staff and patients sought shelter after nearby Kamal Adwan Hospital was destroyed in an Israeli raid last week, reports Al Jazeera.

Late on Friday, a forced order to evacuate was also issued for the al-Awda Hospital, where 100 people are believed to be sheltering.

The evacuation order came as New Zealand Palestine solidarity protesters followed a silent vigil outside Auckland Hospital yesterday with a rally in downtown Auckland’s Te Komititanga Square today, where doctors and other professional health staff called for support for Gaza’s besieged health facilities and protection for medical workers.

Protester Jason holds a placard calling for Kamal Adwan Hospital medical director Dr Hussam Abu Safiyyan to be set free
Protester Jason Brooke holds a placard calling for Kamal Adwan Hospital medical director Dr Hussam Abu Safiyya to be set free at today’s Palestinian solidarity rally in Auckland. Image: David Robie/APR

When New Zealand youth health professional Michael Brenndorfer recalled the first time that the Israel military bombed and destroyed al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza in November 2023, the world was “ready to accept the the lies that Israel told then”.

“Of course, they wouldn’t bomb a hospital, who would bomb a hospital? That’s a horrible war crime, if must have been Hamas that bombed themselves.

“And the world let Israel get away with it. That’s the time that we knew if the world let Israel get away with it once, they would repeat it again and again and we would allow a dangerous precedent to be set where health care workers and health care centres would become targets over and over again.

“In the past year it is exactly what we have seen,” he said to cries of shame.

“We have seen not only the targeting of health care infrastructure, but the targeting of healthcare workers.

“The murdering of healthcare workers, of aid workers all across Gaza at the hands of Israel — openly without any word of opposition from our government, without a word of opposition from any global government about these war crimes and genocidal actions until today.”

In an impassioned speech about the devastating price that Gazans were paying for the Israeli war, New Zealand Palestinian doctor and Gaza survivor Dr Abdallah Gouda vowed that his people would keep their dream for an independent state of Palestine and “we will never leave Gaza”.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has called for an investigation into the Israeli attacks on Gaza hospitals and medical workers.

Volker Türk told the UN Security Council meeting on the Middle East that Israeli claims of Hamas launching attacks from hospitals in Gaza were often “vague” and sometimes “contradicted by publicly available information”.

Tino rangatiratanga and Palestinian flags at the Gazan health workers solidarity rally
Tino rangatiratanga and Palestinian flags at the Gazan health workers solidarity rally in Auckland today. Image: David Robie/APR

Palestine urges UN to end Gaza genocide, ‘Israeli impunity’
Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian envoy to the UN, said: “It is our collective responsibility to bring this hell to an end. It is our collective responsibility to bring this genocide to an end.”

The UNSC meeting on the Middle East came following last week’s raid on the Kamal Adwan Hospital and the arbitrary arrest and detention of its director, Hussam Abu Safia.

“You have an obligation to save lives”, Mansour told the council.

“Palestinian doctors and medical personnel took that mission to heart at the peril of their lives. They did not abandon the victims.

“Do not abandon them. End Israeli impunity. End the genocide. End this aggression immediately and unconditionally, now.”

Palestinian doctors and medical personnel were fighting to save human lives and losing their own while hospitals are under attack, he added.

“They are fighting a battle they cannot win, and yet they are unwilling to surrender and to betray the oath they took,” he said.

Norway is the latest country to condemn the attacks on Gaza’s hospitals and medical workers.

On X, the country’s Foreign Ministry said that “urgent action” was needed to restore north Gaza’s hospitals, which were continuously subjected to Israeli attack.

Without naming Israel, the ministry said that “health workers, patients and hospitals are not lawful targets”.

A critical "NZ media is Zionist media" placard at today's Auckland solidarity rally for Palestinian health workers
A critical “NZ media is Zionist media” placard at today’s Auckland solidarity rally for Palestinian health workers. Image: APR

Israel ‘deprives 40,000’ of healthcare in northern Gaza
The Israeli military is systematically destroying hospitals in northern Gaza, the Gaza Government Media Office said.

In a statement, it said: “The Israeli occupation continues its heinous crimes and arbitrary aggression against hospitals and medical teams in northern Gaza, reflecting a dangerous and deliberate escalation.”

These acts, it added, were being carried out amid “unjustified silence of the international community and the UN Security Council”, violating international humanitarian law and human rights conventions.

The statement highlighted the destruction of Kamal Adwan Hospital, where its director, Dr Hussam Abu Safia, was arrested and reportedly subjected to physical and psychological abuse.

The GMO described these acts as “full-fledged war crimes”.

According to a recent report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Israeli military had conducted more than 136 air raids on at least 27 hospitals and 12 medical facilities across Gaza in the past eight months.

The GMO report demanded an independent international investigation into these violations and accountability for Israel in international courts.

Protesters at today's Auckland rally in solidarity with Palestinian health workers
Protesters at today’s Auckland rally in solidarity with Palestinian health workers under attack from Israeli military. Image: David Robie/APR

Amnesty International criticises detention of Kamal Adwan doctor
Agnes Callamard, secretary-general of the human rights watchdog Amnesty International, said Israel’s detention of Dr Hussam Abu Safia underscored a pattern of “genocidal intent and genocidal acts” by Israel in Gaza.

“Dr Abu Safia’s unlawful detention is emblematic of the broader attacks on the healthcare sector in Gaza and Israel’s attempts to annihilate it,” Callamard said in a social media post.

“None of the medical staff abducted by Israeli forces since November 2023 from Gaza during raids on hospitals and clinics has been charged or put before a trial; those released after enduring unimaginable torture were never charged and did not stand trial.

“Those still detained remain held without charges or trial under inhumane conditions and at risk of torture,” she added.

Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa secretary Neil Scott speaking at today's Auckland rally
Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa secretary Neil Scott speaking at today’s Auckland rally supporting health workers under Israeli attack in Gaza. Image: David Robie/APR

‘Suspend Israel ties’ plea to global medical professionals – Auckland hospital protest vigil over Gaza

By
Cafe Pacific Publisher
-
0
New Zealand protesters against the genocide and attacks on the healthcare workers and hospitals in Gaza outside Auckland Hospital
New Zealand protesters against the genocide and attacks on the healthcare workers and hospitals in Gaza in a solidarity silent vigil outside Auckland Hospital today. Image: David Robie/APR

Asia Pacific Report

The UN’s Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, Francesca Albanese, has called on “medical professionals worldwide” to suspend ties with Israel in an act of solidarity with the more than “1000 colleagues of yours” killed in Gaza over the past 14 months.

Countless more Palestinian medical workers “were arrested, tortured, disappeared”, Albanese said in a post on social media.

“Out of dismay [and] solidarity you should revolt, and urge suspension of ties with Israel until it stops the genocide [and] accounts for it. What are you waiting for,” she said.

Some of the New Zealand children at the Auckland City Hospital Palestine protest vigil today
Some of the New Zealand children at the Auckland City Hospital Palestine protest vigil today, calling for the detained Kamal Adwan medical director Dr Hussam Abu Saffiya to be set free . . . most of the more than 45,000 people killed in Gaza by the Israeli military are women and children. Image: David Robie/APR

Her appeal came as about 100 New Zealand protesters held a “silent vigil” outside the country’s largest medical institution, Auckland Hospital, declaring health workers were “not a target”.

Earlier on Friday, Albanese and the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Physical and Mental Health, Dr Tlaleng Mofokeng, issued a joint statement denouncing the “blatant disregard” for the right to health in the Gaza Strip following Israel’s attack on the Kamal Adwan Hospital and the detention of its director, Dr Hussam Abu Safia.

“For well over a year into the genocide, Israel’s blatant assault on the right to health in Gaza and the rest of the occupied Palestinian territory is plumbing new depths of impunity,” the UN experts said.

The New Zealand protesters spread in a long line outside Auckland hospital with banners declaring “healthcare workers in Aotearoa call for a ceasefire” and “stop the genocide”, and placards with slogans such as “healthcare workers and hospitals are not a target”, “Free Dr Hussam Abu Saffiya” and “hands off Kamal Adwan [a northern Gaza hospital destroyed by Israeli forces last week].

Palestinian Prisoners Society warn over ‘danger’ to Dr Hussam
The Palestinian Prisoners Society has warned of “a danger” to Dr Hussam Abu Safiyya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, following the Israeli military’s denial of any records proving his arrest, reports Anadolu Ajensi.

Munir al-Bursh, the Director-General of Gaza’s Health Ministry, said the ministry submitted a request through the Physicians for Human Rights organisation to inquire about Abu Safiyya’s fate, but the Israeli occupation responded by saying that it had no detainee by that name.

Al-Bursh told the Al Jazeera news channel that there was concern that the Israeli occupation may execute Dr Abu Safia after his arrest about a week ago.

In a statement, the Palestinian Prisoners Society said that Dr Abu Safiyya “is one of thousands of detainees from Gaza facing the crime of enforced disappearance”.

The group said that “despite clear evidence of Dr Abu Safia’s arrest on December 27, 2024, the occupation is denying what it had previously stated and is also dismissing the evidence, including photos and videos it published as well as testimonies from some detainees who were released.”

It held the Israeli authorities fully responsible for his fate.

It also reiterated its call for the “international human rights system to save what remains of its role amid the ongoing genocide, after its function has eroded due to a frightening state of impotence.”

Last Saturday, Gaza’s Health Ministry announced the arrest of Dr Abu Safiyya by the Israeli military in northern Gaza.

The Auckland City Hospital silent vigil protest today over the genocide in Gaza
The Auckland City Hospital silent vigil protest today over the genocide in Gaza. Image: David Robie/APR

‘Proud’ of 15 months of NZ protest
Meanwhile, the national chair of New Zealand’s Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) issued a statement today critical of the government’s inaction in the face of the ongoing genocide and the destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system as protests continued across the country.

“While the stench of decaying morality hangs over [New Zealand’s] coalition government and its MPs after 15 months of complicity with genocide, nationwide protests against Israel’s genocide continue in 2025,” said national chair John Minto.

Protesters at the Auckland Hospital silent vigil protest
Protesters at the Auckland Hospital silent vigil protest today over the genocide in Gaza. Image: David Robie/APR

“Over 15 months of weekly nationwide protests is unprecedented in New Zealand history on any issue at any time.

“We are enormously proud of New Zealanders who stand with the vast mass of humanity against Israel’s systematic, indiscriminate killing of Palestinians in Gaza.

“This week’s protests are the first of New Year and they will continue while our government cowers under the bedclothes and refuses to sanction Israel for genocide.”

The Gaza death toll stands at more than 45,000 — the majority killed being women and children.

“Today’s death toll of innocents killed is a repeating nightmare” for Palestine, he said while Western media highlighted “Israeli propaganda to justify the endless massacres while ignoring Palestinian voices”.

The United Nations has denounced the targeting of hospitals in the Gaza Strip, saying that medical facilities need “to be off limits”.

UN deputy spokesperson Farhan Haq said that there were more than 12,000 people in Gaza who need medical evacuation.

A protester chalks a "Boycott Israel, boycott genocide" sign on the pavement near Auckland Hospital today
A protester chalks a “Boycott Israel, boycott genocide” sign on the pavement near Auckland Hospital today. Image: David Robie/APR
1...456...94Page 5 of 94

Popular Posts

Twitter

Follow, subscribe, interact via Café Pacific's social platforms (below).

DavidRobie.nz

The latest

Caitlin Johnstone: Even more assaults on free speech to silence criticism of Israel

Articles 0
COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone Notes from The Edge of the...

Rainbow Warrior back in Marshall Islands on nuclear justice mission

Articles 0
By Reza Azam of Greenpeace Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior has...

Vanuatu mourns loss of iconic Pacific media pioneer Marc Neil-Jones

Articles 0
OBITUARY: By Terence Malapa in Port Vila Vanuatu’s media community...

Subscribe

© 2023 DavidRobie.nz. All Rights Reserved. Served by Multimedia Investments Ltd.